Diversifying your Spanish language bookshelf

At Spanish Alive, we promote reading BIG TIME. We believe that aside from an actual immersion setting (such as a classroom or living in a Spanish speaking country) that reading in the Spanish language is the best immersion environment. By reading in the Spanish language (or whatever language you are learning), you have to use critical thinking skills to understand new words, you view the language in context, and a new language provides a new lens in which to view the world. All of these actions help words stick in your brain. We recommend reading in Spanish (or your target language) for 10-20 minutes a day to increase proficiency!

Reading opens our minds to new perspectives, people, cultures and view points. It's an incredibly powerful tool. We're always looking for new authors and topics for our in-house library. If you are looking to diversify your Spanish language bookshelf at home with Black authors and topics that confront race, identity and oppression, we are here to direct you to some resources.

We already have many books by A.C. Quintero on our bookshelves and encourage you to check out her amazing writing here.

Learning Bilingually has an amazing Facebook page that shares resources for bilingual education. She has compiled a fantastic list of books in the Spanish language that focus on race, identity, oppression and discrimination from a variety of authors that you can see here. Follow her page on Facebook as she'll be releasing more information on these books in the coming weeks.

If you are looking to purchase any of these books, take a look at bookshop.org. BookShop enables you to order books online, but it supports local bookstores. Since we, too, are a small business, we want to spread the love to other small business owners. If you are really looking to make an impact with your dollars, buy from a Black-owned or POC-owned bookstore.

We realize this is a simple list of resources and as we find more, we will share them with you. Diversifying your bookshelf is one small step to confronting oppression and racism. If you have resources that you've encountered or would like us to share, contact us at info@spanishalive.org. As always, you can find us on Facebook and Instagram!